A core component of the MA in Visual Arts Management and Curating programme is a 9-week internship carried out over the summer months. Coming towards the end of their MA studies, students tell us that the internship provides them with the opportunity to put into practice the skills and knowledge they have gained during their time at Richmond. Students are placed with a wide range of leading cultural institutions depending on their personal interests. This week we were delighted to hear that Kaitlyn Durvin who has been interning at Arts and Business Council Greater Boston has been offered full time employment.

Arts & Business Boston were so impressed with Kaitlyn’s performance while on placement, that they have created a new position especially for her. In this role Kaitlyn will be responsible for leading on programs, artists and communication.

D’ylnne Plummer, Director of Professional Development, Arts and Business Council Greater Boston commented on Kaitlyn’s performance to date:

“she’s very energetic and attentive, and we know she’ll continue to add a lot of value in her role. We expect there will be a learning curve for her over the next few months, but she asks good questions and makes good decisions, and she also works well autonomously, so we think this will be a great fit. She has done great work during her internship.”

Dr Robert J. Wallis, Professor of Visual Culture, has been published in the journal, ‘The Falconer’, in an article entitled ‘”To claim a great antiquity for that diversion”: re-examining the earliest evidence for falconry’. Wallis’ critical overview of this neglected subject develops his work published in the journal ‘Antiquity’ in 2014 and considers the latest evidence in art and archaeology from prehistoric Britain, the Near East, Central Asia and East Asia.

Wallis challenges the widespread assumption that falconry originated in Central Asia up to 6,000 years ago, arguing that the convincing evidence here does not in fact emerge until the middle of the first millennium CE, and in East Asia a little earlier, from the early first millennium CE. Recent suggestions that falconry may have been practiced in Bronze Age Britain are also unpersuasive.

Wallis demonstrates that the most convincing evidence for the earliest falconry emerges from the early to mid third millennium BCE in Anatolia. His ongoing research is in preparation for the first book-length treatment of the subject.

A core component of the MA in Art History and Visual Culture programme is a 9-week internship carried out over the summer months. Coming towards the end of their MA studies, students tell us that the internship provides them with the opportunity to put into practice the skills and knowledge they have gained during their time at Richmond. Students are placed with a wide range of leading cultural institutions depending on their personal interests. Last week Madison Martin, one of the students on the Art History and Visual Culture Programme successfully completed her internship at South London Gallery.

During her time with the South London Gallery, Madison has gained an insight into the wide range of activities that happen every day to ensure a public gallery runs smoothly, and exhibitions are curated and installed successfully. As she comes to the end of her time at South London Gallery she reflects on her experience and what she has learnt along the way:

“What I like about working for the programmes department is that everyone is

working together for one goal. All of the little pieces have to be complete before the one major thing can come together. So everything that I have been doing has been a little piece for the whole. As of lately everyone has been working together for Thomas Hirschhorn’s exhibition opening today. So there is high stress, but I kind of like it because it will come together and everything that could possibly go wrong is going wrong. So right now it is impossible to see that the opening is going to happen tonight but at the same time we know it is coming one way or another. The only thing we can do is all work together to make everything look as best as possible.”

For Madison this internship confirmed to her that she is well suited to working in a public gallery environment.

“I have accomplished confidence in knowing what I want to do with my future.

I want to work with art that sparks conversation, change’s people opinions, art that is controversial. I want to be working with art and artists who will one day be in art history books and something that people talked about or raved about and will write there theses on. I think that is so exciting and what I am doing here at South London Gallery, and what the SLG is doing is that kind of art.”

Richmond has worked with South London Gallery over the last number of years, and has successfully placed a number of students with the gallery. As Madison moves on, another student from Richmond is due to start her internship with the gallery this week.

A core component of the MA in Visual Arts Management and Curating programme is a 9-week internship carried out over the summer months. Coming towards the end of their MA studies, students tell us that the internship provides them with the opportunity to put into practice the skills and knowledge they have gained during their time at Richmond. Students are placed with a wide range of leading cultural institutions depending on their personal interests. This week Haley Fortune, one of the students on the MA in Visual Arts Management and Curating successfully completed her internship at The Wallace Collection.

During her time with the Wallace Collection Haley has gained an insight into the wide range of activities education staff carry out on a daily basis, as she comes to the end of her time with the Wallace Collection she reflects on what for her was a hugely positive experience.

“This internship as a whole has been such a learning experience for me and that is what I would like to reflect upon as a whole. I have learned and been able to do so much in the field of museum education. I have been taught to think outside of the box for ways to link different sessions etc. to objects in the collection, which will be a useful tool in my future career. I have learned that you can link paintings to music and patterns to geometry, something I would have never thought of before. I have also been exposed to so many wonderful people through the community outreach programme, from participating in embroidering cloths with women who are deaf and hard of hearing to going on tours and reminiscing with people living with dementia. Learning has been the biggest part of this whole experience for me. Not only did I learn new skills but I also learned valuable lessons from people that I worked with. All the staff at the Wallace Collection were patient with me as I learned the ropes. I saw their confidence in me grow and as a result my confidence in myself has grown exponentially. This has definitely been one of the greatest experiences of my life and I look forward to applying the things I have learned to other places I am fortunate enough to work.”

“I can definitely say that I have grown as a person in my abilities and my confidence as a result of working with the education department at the Wallace Collection.”

Dom Alessio, Dean of International Programmes and Professor of History, gave a keynote speech this week at the University of Vienna for the annual conference of the New Zealand Studies Association. The paper was co-written with Dr. Wesley Renfro from St. John Fischer College, New York. Dom and Wes’s paper was entitled “‘The Island of thieves': Rethinking Empire and the United States in a South Pacific Context” and examined the way by which military bases were acquired in the region and the significance of such acquisitions – both historically (nuclear testing in the Cold War) and currently (Washington’s pivot to Asia).

From the wailing police sirens in The Bill (1984-2010), to the gun-toting bad boys in Top Boy (2011-2013), during the late 20th and early 21st century, London’s Heygate council estate was a stage on which to enact terrifying anxieties about crime and social deviance. As if in answer to these visualizations, in 2010 the government announced a £1.5 billion regeneration project that will transform the area into a “brand-new town centre” over the next fifteen years. By demolishing the Heygate and replacing it with mixed-income accommodations, the council aim to counteract the area’s association with concentrated poverty, organized crime and dependency on benefits. I propose that the dystopian vision of the Heygate in popular visual texts contributed to its notoriety in the nation’s visual imagination, and consequently helped to influence its socio-spatial restructure.

This article considers the visual activism of residents who respond to the dominant visualizations of their homes with counter-narratives centred on an attachment to place.I focus primarily on the website, Southwark Notes, a dynamic and malleable digital text that facilitates and makes visible citizen action and a sense of creative ownership over the rapidly changing urban landscape in Southwark. The site is a practical manifestation of what I call usable memory––a place where residents reminisce about their deeply rooted past, utilizing this historical attachment to place to unite and prevent the uprooting of community landmarks in the future.

The FotoFocus Biennial launched in 2012 to present a month-long celebration of photography and lens-based art in Cincinnati, Ohio. As a non-profit organization, FotoFocus is dedicated to sponsoring and providing funds to institutions to produce photography exhibitions and events that are artistically and intellectually engaging, while also being enriching to a large and diverse public. For example, most recently FotoFocus was a proud supporter of the Screenings during Paris Photo LA in April 2014. In this lecture, the Executive Director of FotoFocus introduces the project, examines its contributions to date, and considers and its position as an international art fair.

Mary Ellen Goeke has worked for over twenty-five years with museums and art organizations in New York, Chicago, Hartford and Cincinnati. She has held a number of positions at the Cincinnati Art Museum and at the American Federation of Arts in New York, the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, and the Terra Museum of American Art/Musée d’Art Américain in Giverny. She established a private consulting practice in Cincinnati in established 2001. She graduate with an MA in Art History at Richmond University in 2006. Her thesis examined fine art museums and early 20th century photography: Aesthetics, Taste and Cultural Distinction: The Museum of Modern Art and An American Place Gallery, New York, 1929.

The battle for history: why Europe should resist the temptation to rewrite its own communist past

Earlier this month the Czech and Slovak governments criticised the airing of a Russian documentary on the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, with the Slovak ministry of foreign affairs describing it as an attempt ‘to rewrite history’. Martin D. Brown writes that while the documentary was undoubtedly flawed, the diplomatic spat was symptomatic of a situation in which Russia has increasingly adopted a resolutely Soviet view of history, while post-Soviet states have supported the construction of a consciously anti-Soviet history built around the concept of totalitarianism. He argues that there is little to gain from EU states rewriting their own past simply to counter the Russian narrative.